We've been having such a blast telling you about our Fall Features... that we decided to extend it one more day--plus we have a SURPRISE in store for you tomorrow!! Be sure to check back!

One of our favorites for Fall is learning about Pocahontas. In Virginia, she is one of the famous Americans we learn about for our Social Studies SOLs (Standards of Learning). We always start with a KWL chart. Click HERE for a freebie KWL to get you started. This is SO important when beginning a new topic, especially when the topic is Pocahontas--because most students will "know" the Disney movie version, but not the real story.

Here's a little "Snapshot Story" packet on Pocahontas that includes an interactive book (where students can manipulate the pieces to tell and re-tell the story) plus an emergent reader (that can be added to their individual book boxes). Unfortunately, I'm having a bit of trouble uploading it to TpT... so stay tuned! :o)

Have a great day!

Karen :o)

Remember... Blog Hoppin' has a special treat in store for you tomorrow, so we will see you then!!

Hey y'all! It's Leslie Ann from Life in First Grade (and the still kinda new Life in Fifth Grade). I'm so happy to be a part of Blog Hoppin's Fall Features. Fall is one of my favorite seasons and October is my favorite month (maybe because it's my birthday month :) ), so creating fall resources for my classroom is very enjoyable for me. I'm going to share with y'all my best seller: a literary companion to one of my all time favorite Halloween books Room on a Broom. If you haven't read this book with your kids, go out right now, purchase it, and make plans to read it first thing tomorrow morning. It was always a HUGE hit with my kids.

I've included printables to use after reading the story, but my favorite part is the sequencing activity/craft. Be sure and check it out in my TpT store :)

Hey! It’s Kim from kindergals! I try really hard to like fall, but….I am a summer girl. Usually I’m when Fall comes because it means that cold weather is just around the corner. Anything below 60 and I need a coat! So I try to find lots of fun things to do so that I can be more positive about this season. Our family goes to a ranch each fall and picks apples and pumpkins. We take a hayride and do the corn maze. I buy some new fall clothes…and plan my fall get away to somewhere warmer!
So enough about me…what are we doing in Megan’s room to celebrate the season? Here are a few things from our Apples and Pumpkins Unit. We used interactive writing to write the life cycle of the pumpkin.
The kids made this fun little pumpkin craftivity from a small water bottle to show the life cycle of the pumpkin.
We learned lots of information about pumpkins and the kids wrote two facts they learned and drew their diagram.
We compared the characters and their adventures in The Biggest Pumpkin Ever. Half the class worked with me during an interactive writing lesson to write all about Desmond. The other half of the class worked in centers. Then we swapped. The other half of the class wrote about Clayton. When we came back together on the rug, we constructed the Venn Diagram by reading their sentences and deciding where it belonged.
For this lesson we talked about words that could describe a pumpkin. The kids painted two paper plates and I stapled the together to make a pumpkin. Inside they put their own bubble map and wrote words to describe pumpkins.
We also made a brace map for the parts of the pumpkin. We did the same thing for apples. As a matter of fact, in this unit I did apple activities just like the pumpkin ones! So, it’s like two units in one.
Here’s where we did our nonfiction interactive writing about apples. On the right is the describing words for apples. In the middle you can see what the inside of their craftivity looks like.
We had a tasting party and tasted red, yellow and green apples. Then, we made a pie graph to show which ones we liked best.
Here is our craftivity for the poem Way Up High In the Apple Tree.
We finished the unit by comparing apples and pumpkins! This isn’t all of the activities in the unit, just a few that I remembered to take pictures of!
So Happy Fall, Ya’ll!

Hi Blog Hoppin' Buddies!! Kerri B from Teacher Bits and Bobs here...Is anyone else excited about Halloween, like me? Usually, I am all bah humbug about this holiday, but for some reason this year, I am all kinds of excited about it! My daughter and her 2 friends are going to be ROCK, PAPER, and SCISSORS, so I will be making one FABULOUS rock costume next week! Any tips for me??I found these ADORABLE mustache Converse on Journeys.com a few weeks ago...

so I have decided to have my costume be one giant mustache from head to toe! Mustache shirt, mustache PJ pants, mustache shoes, even mustache accessories!

I have to say that these centers are pretty darn cute, and my Firsties love them! They went B-A-N-A-N-A-S last year for these bad boys!Here's what you get...

I will be incorporating these little spookylicious centers into the next 2 weeks of the Halloween madness!!Click on any picture above if you would like to embrace the madness as well! :)Finally, here is a little Monster Catcher FREEBIE that I will be doing in Math Centers next week in order to promote Halloween a little bit more...It's a monster catcher! This 2 page math activity has students write addition sentences to show how many heads, eyes, arms, legs, etc. their monster will have, and then draw it in the jar. I think they will dig it, and they can practice their addition at the same time!! Click on the jar to get a copy~

Hey y'all! Are you loving getting all of the fresh new fall ideas from Blog Hoppin'? I know I am! I'm here to show you some of the fun fall things we've been doing in our classroom the past couple of weeks! Fall is probably my favorite time of year so I like to bring the joys of the season right into my classroom through meaningful learning experiences. You can find all of these activities in one of these center packs: Fall-tastic Fun Centers, Apple Fun Unit, & Scarecrows, Spiders, & Skeletons Unit.

Here, students counted the leafy sets that were "falling" from the ceiling and recorded it on their paper.

Number words can be tricky, but they are so much fun to learn if you get to use a cube, glue, and leaves!

I love using real objects when I can such as the sorting baskets. It really makes the game engaging.

We picked apples from the tree and recorded the uppercase and lowercase letters.

Vowels are so important and that's why we practice them every week...Which vowel Johnny Appleseed will make it to his pack and win?!

The spider bag came from Target and I knew it would be perfect for this grab and record game...but wait, if you pick a sticky web you lose a turn.

Another game where we find things hanging from the ceiling...The kids just love to be up and moving...since that what kids are best at!

And, finally, I like that this game offers various fonts to read the sight words and the fact they have to read the word 6 times.

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